“Flow was first identified and studied by the pioneering psychological scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,” said Kounios. “He defined it as ‘a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.’”

Kounios noted that although flow has long been a topic of public fascination as well as the focus of hundreds of behavioral research studies, there has been no consensus about what flow is. Their new study decided between different theories of how flow is involved when people produce creative ideas.”